Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Peterus7 writes "I'm a student teacher in an 8th grade science classroom, and have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online. After realizing that, I've been looking for ways to incorporate internet resources into my teaching, and trying to find cool citizen science projects, activities, and simulations that would be appropriate for a grade school science class, such as galaxyzoo and fold.it. So, I'm asking slashdot for more resources that could help bring science to their lives. Thanks!"

I second this. Also, go to Wikipedia frontpage, follow links that you find interesting. The amount of stuff I've learned doing that is immense.

Then again, I'm way past school age, and back then I'd only look at stuff the teacher DIDN'T tell me to look at. Maybe you should instruct them to look at Fox News, tmz, Hello magazine, and a good dose of X-Factor and Big Brother reruns.

Khan was valedictorian of his high school class and attained a perfect score in the math portion of his SATs. Khan holds three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Ted Williams was the greatest hitter of the modern era of baseball. He sucked as a coach and a manager--because all the qualifications in the world doesn't mean that you can then get someone else to do it.

Saying that this is not a good resource depends on what you compare it to. If you compare to an experienced and brilliant teacher giving lectures to a small group of students then Khan does not really have a chance. If you compare also to best of books he is a bit shaky. But I've read that lots of people find it a good resource and I am not surprised - it is a video, you can do it at your own pace and it has a social network component. If used as additional learning tool I can't see how you could call it an

Cool if your high school chemistry teacher allowed you to synthesize NI3 or NI3(NH3) and then use it. Was he fired afterwards?
NI3(NH3) is impressive for stability demos and maybe even a very cautious practical joke. We did not make it until university, where one of the chemistry lecturers was slightly mad - the labs had to be evacuated on several occasions because of the experiments he encouraged.

Also, let me add - this was 25 years ago. Schools seem to be much more twitchy about such things these days.

Yep. 35+ years since I was in high school. We played with all sorts of "dangerous" stuff in our poorly-equipped chemistry and physics labs. It included some organic synthesis and distillation as well as pyrotechics (the usual Mg, Na+water, etc.), and we also played a little with throwing around lightning, and spinning while holding heavy gyroscopes. Of these, the gyroscope sessions were probably the ones with the smallest safety margin.

It is true that a science teacher should include practical experiments, if the kids are going to do the expeiments themselves. If you are just going to demonstrations, then I see no reason why kids should not just be watching videos. I believe the computer simulations are way underrated in a world where schools are more fearful of letting kids do anything useful.

These practical experiments will give the conceptual basis of what will be tested if the kids ever take an AP Science exam. They do not need to be fancy. Heat water measure rate of change. Build a gravity accelerated race track, film the cars, and analyze using free video analysis software. Run 1mw laser though pieces of plastic. And, the most important experiement of all, give them measuring instruments, let them measure things around the room, and then compare results. They will be amazed at how different everyone's mesasurements are. At that age, mean, mode, median, and rage are valid math concepts.

As far as online goes. Look for any and all animated experiments. PHET has many of them. You can download videos of experiments, or have the kids make them, and make scatter plots relating various variables using Tracker Video Analysis. The construction of these graphs meet many objects for high school math and science. I have found online sources to simulate any experiment that I want to do. Most of these are accesible to almost any age group by simply by adjusiting pre-lab instruction and post-lab assessment

Just like in any expeiment, the pre- and post-lab are the thing. Most kids will lean very little from a lab without a pre- and post-lab. Doing the lab is only going to be so successful. The required analysis of what the student has observed is a key learning process. In any lab, online or not, know the concepts that are to be taught, and how they will be reinforced and assesed. For instance on PHET you can make resistors catch fire. Why do they catch fire? Will they catch fire faster if the resistance is increased of the potential or current. This creates an exciting learning activity.

An inclined plane is a pretty good way to slow things down. If you need to rewind it, put the ball on top of the inclined plane again.

There's a major benefit of an actual ball and inclined plane over a video of it.

You *know* the ball is going to follow the laws of physics, whatever they are.

When you watch a simulation, you don't know whether the simulation is right or not. You're not learning from the real world any more, you're learning from models and calculations. You're like the anti-vivisectionist girl

How about nobody is allowed to post on/. without first building their own computer? I'll be generous, you're allowed to simply strap a uC to a board, but you do have to write your own bootstrap routine. Bonus points for doing it properly and using discretes. Now, back to physics, it's about measuring it yourself, and understanding every step. Video camera + crazy software is going to take a long time to understand (care to explain motion artefacts captured by a video camera?). Start from Galileo, work up.

If you are just going to demonstrations, then I see no reason why kids should not just be watching videos.

There is a huge difference between seeing something live and watching a recording. We are all used to seeing amazing and impossible things on video for entertainment. Doing something real in front of a lecture has a far bigger impact. Plus students get the chance to ask "but what if you did X instead of Y" and see the results (assuming it is safe!).

But when you get to set them on fire yourself... it's "Holy SHIT!!! We got to BURN SHIT in CLASS TODAY!!!" and they'll talk about it for weeks. This is what is called a Golden Opportunity to actually teach them what's going on.

Exactly. And you don't have to do dramatic experiments/demonstrations every week. Just one spectacle per month will get your students interested in the subject and will earn you a reputation as the Teacher Who Does Good Shit.
Our older daughter's physics teacher recently got them to play with the van der Graaf generator (I have similar fond memories from high school). She was one of the eager volunteers for some hair-raising experiments, including shooting sparks from her fingertips. She told us that almost

1) This. Video is no substitute for real life.
2) Nobody remembers how to measure anything these days. I spend a large part of my time explaining to PhD students (and the not so occasional postdoc) how to measure stuff, and why their measurements might not quite match their equations, and why they shouldn't always believe their (or my) results. And why some measurements are pointless, because the error is larger than the number they're looking for. We've gotta start teaching this stuff early.

I've taught a course called Technology in Science Education, and my premise was that technology for the sake of technology is the wrong way to go - a sentiment I hear echoed here pretty frequently. HOWEVER, there's a reason we use technology - it gives us abilities that we don't commonly have. And this addresses that other common critique when someone wants a technology for education - it's not just a "Cool, see how this is on a computer now?" thing, or a replacement for hands-on experimentation, but rath

I remember our science teacher getting a very large steel drum, putting some water in it and heating, then quickly screwing on a tight-fittning cap and dousing the thing in iced water. It collapsed on itself in a satisfyingly noisy way, showing just how substantial atmospheric pressure is.

Our teacher would always have a "demo" if everyone was in their seats on time and quiet when the bell rang.

Some of the 'epic' ones I still remember:Coiled a gas tube through a beaker. Filled the beaker with liquid nitrogen, so then we had liquid natural gas (not sure what they run to chem labs). He lit the beaker on fire and then dumped it on the floor. It was like watching a bead of water skitter across a hot skillet, except it was on fire.

They also got 2 massive blocks of dry ice. Lit up magnesium and put it in the center. We then removed the dry ice and what was left was a solid chunk of carbon. Magnesium is so insistent on burning that it ripped the oxygen from the CO2 to sustain itself.

One day we went out to the football stands and he had a rig setup that would drop a bowling ball straight down just as another one shot off the side. Used to show shit falls just as fast even if it's moving sideways.

We made nitrocellulose rockets, tie dye lab coats, ethanol, rootbeer, and Hydrogen we blew up. All pretty cool. O chem was rad.Experiments don't have to be useless. There just need to be better more interesting experiments and ones which are practical as well.

"That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest-son-of-a-bitch in space! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going until it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years! If you pull the trigger on this you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime!" -- Alliance Sergeant in Mass Effect 2

I've been out of school for quite a while but have kindled an interest in physics. I find that more and more there are Youtube demonstrations and lectures that are worthwhile. Also labs and hands-on science work is invaluable so I'd check out instructables.com because this not only can provide unique science opportunities, it also helps people in gaining engineering skills.
BTM

Seriously, have them play with applets like this [polyu.edu.hk] that show them how simple things can behave very differently from an initial guess would suggest. And motivate them with "further up ahead, people are doing awesome things!"

Teach the kids about 3D printing (see http://reprap.org/ [reprap.org] maybe even get one of the cheap printer kits or an UP! Printer if you have budget.

These things let kids unleash a form of creativity and spatial learning that is hard to find anywhere else. No need to actually teach them how to design 3D objects - they'll be scrambling to figure it out for themselves! Keen students will print their own 3D printers. Less enthusiastic ones will download from http://thingiverse.com/ [thingiverse.com] and create "Mash up" objects.

Inevitably one of them will print a penis for shock value, but kids are like that.

Er, that is fairly well removed from the concept of science. Science is about, you know, the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, experiment, refine, repeat. The closest I can see this coming is material science, like finding the optimal wall thickness for a given force, but I'd say that's closer to applied engineering.

You may want to look at Scratch programming environment [mit.edu]. While Scratch is a programming tool which lets kids make all sorts of stuff (animations, games, etc), there is a large number of kids who build science simulations with it. For example, you can look at this gallery [mit.edu] of physics simulations and animations, all of which were created by kids. Most of the projects on the Scratch website have been created by kids and all projects are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, so kids in your class will be able to download the projects, examine how they have been built, and build their own projects upon existing work.
There is also a website [mit.edu] for educators who want to use Scratch - you can ask for ideas and suggestions in the forums in that website.

[Disclaimer: I am a graduate student in the research group which develops Scratch]

I'm not a grad student at the Media Lab, and I'll second everything the poster above said. I've been using Scratch with 5th grade students for physics and even some simple ecosystem simulations (all student created) for about 4 years now. The programming language is simple enough to get out of the kids' way and let them create what they want. Whatever you are teaching - if the kids truly understand it they can show you by creating a sim for it, and if they don't understand it they have to figure it out i

Scratch was a big hit with 4th and 5th graders when I demoed it to them, they also had fun with it at home. I could see you setting up some scratch sensors and using them to capture measurements from a live experiment.Cassiopeia project [cassiopeiaproject.com] also has some great videos, especially if you want to interest boys with raging hormones in science.

1. The Today in Science [todayinsci.com] listing of birth and death dates of scientists, and notable events. (For example, today is the anniversary of the publication of Einstein's paper on General Relativity, Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitästheorie.

It takes something on the face of it boring (the chemical elements as a simple diagram) and makes it really interesting. If it's not good enough to show to students directly then it should contain plenty of ideas for how to make elements interesting.

A couple of examples: get some tungsten and some magnesium of about equal volume and anyone will notice that one is much, much denser despite both being normal-looking metals. Get some indium and let the students bend thick metal rods with their bare hands.

Hey! I'm just going through a teacher's program right now, and I've been looking for resources to use with smartboard. First of all, if you don't have a smartboard go here:http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ [johnnylee.net]

Then try out:Algodoo (costs about 25 euros): Great physics simulator. I would say it would be useful even for university students. You can, however, adjust the difficulty level. It's good for kinematics, some optics, buoyancy, some fluid dynamics and a few other things. I started off with making a piston pump system.http://www.algodoo.com/wiki/Home [algodoo.com]

Crayon physics: Great for intuitively exploring some physics concepts. It costs about 20 bucks. It's similar to above but it's closer to a game. There are a series of challenges that you accomplish (try to move a ball to a star, overcoming a series of obstacles. Learn some physics concepts through osmosis.http://www.crayonphysics.com/ [crayonphysics.com]

Celestia: Great freeware for exploring our galaxy (and neighboring galaxies). It implements astronomy knowledge into a space simulator. It allows to you to visit out solar system and beyond. As humanity discovers more, you can update the planet (i.e. with new exoplanets). This one is super cool, a little like Eve Online but IRL. You can also install Star Trek universe updates if you are a trekkie, as well as Star Wars.http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ [shatters.net]

Ok that's the coolest stuff. There are other things out there but they aren't as impressive. ScaleoftheUniverse is neat, but limited in classroom utility: http://www.scaleoftheuniverse.com/ [scaleoftheuniverse.com]

Various mechanical and electronic measuring tools abound for use with the PC and for manual use.

They need to learn how to use such tools no matter what sub-discipline they enter. Even if they never use such tools much, they must know they exist and how they work, because they will then know people can do work with those tools on such projects.

Tools to measure and compare distance, time, velocity, weight, PH, temperature, frequency, polarization of light, etc. are all absolutely needed to understand science

Here is a video [youtube.com] that my daughter put together on how to make a diffusion cloud chamber. It takes about 10 minutes to make and you need a keyboard air duster. With it you can see the tracks left by background and cosmic radiation. It is a pretty cool way to visually introduce particle physics.

"I.. have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online."

I call bullshit. You're noticing students motivated by non-school things, that happen to be online. Put school online and they will be equally disinterested as before. (Although you get to be that teacher going "Look! I'm hip! I get online! I'm so cool!").

Or, show me an experiment that an online program has better interest-level and/or student outcomes (from the same population of student).

Or, show me an experiment that an online program has better interest-level and/or student outcomes (from the same population of student).

Like the hole in the wall experiments?:http://solesandsomes.wikispaces.com/http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.htmlhttp://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1542231/Using-the-Web-To-Turn-Kids-Into-Autodidacts

"Yes, it's true that you won't have many resources for "gold standard" double-blind, same population proof for online education, but being in education, you must certainly know that no such study is even possible. Education research just can't happen that way."

The best way to get kids attention is to start with something that defines intuition, and really focus the discussion on that to begin. Example: we all know that when you cool a substance, it goes from gas to liquid to solid. When you heat it up, it goes from solid to liquid to gas. Look at the noble egg—goes in the pan as a liquid, and as it heats.........wait, ok, well that's a bad example. We all know that when you something turns into a solid, it gets denser, and we know that dense things sink in

These two sites talk about science errors in movies and TV shows. It's a great way to start a discussion because you're leading in with something fun and familiar, and possibly even something that they've seen and thought "oh no WAY could that work."

Sadly, it's been too long since Phil's done a good Bad review. Shame, because there's been a lot of good ones these past few years, like a recent trailer talking about how we only use 20% of our brain. The old cliche used to be 10%, so maybe progress is being made.:-P Eh, maybe I'll take up the gauntlet. I have some web real estate somewhere, I think.

Three comments in, and it's a knife fight about the school system between the "Burn The Schools" crowd and the "Teachers and schools are noble places of unicorns and rainbows and they just need another fifty million billion zillion dollars" contingent.

My advice: Eff the Intertoobs. Take them out to see science and engineering in action. Go to a factory. Go someplace something gets built. Take them to some hub of commerce. Take to a stock exchange or a bank. Teach them that the numbers matter, that they have purpose and meaning. Show them the real world works, and not the filthy 1-dimensional world views you get in places like this. Field trips, my boy, field trips.

I have to ask, does whatever you do for a living come close to making the same positive contribution to society as an average teacher? You say that teachers whom are motivated and genuinely want students to learn are rare. Why do you think people, especially those with degrees in the maths and sciences, choose to teach? For the money?

Short hours, long summer vacation, lack of supervision, great retirement benefits, union benefits, tenure, and discount at Border's books all come to mind. Not to mention that teachers pay increases have outstripped inflation consistently which cannot be said of very many fields. I don't begrudge teachers what they are paid, but they are represented by the largest union in the country, and they are not under compensated as a group and I am tired of hearing that refrain.

It's just all so damn sad. I'm falling into a puddle of my own tears. Oh my! I mean, education only makes up around 55% to 65% of state budgets. Why, whatever will those poor destitute people, do? Clearly, they need 100% of all taxes to go to education. Then everything will be perfect and everyone will be well educated and teachers will finally be able to stop living on the street, sleeping in the gutters and living on cans of cat food!

It's just all so damn sad. I'm falling into a puddle of my own tears. Oh my! I mean, education only makes up around 55% to 65% of state budgets. Why, whatever will those poor destitute people, do? Clearly, they need 100% of all taxes to go to education. Then everything will be perfect and everyone will be well educated and teachers will finally be able to stop living on the street, sleeping in the gutters and living on cans of cat food!

Ah, yes, $37.5 MILLION would be quite the bargain for the state of California, wouldn't it? Next time, I'll try to remember to put my pinkie next to my mouth when I misstate a dollar amount by three orders of magnitude.

Teachers are in the top half of all earners in almost every state of the union. This is only counting the 9 months they work in their regular contract. If they cannot make ends meet, it means that either half of the US workforce is destitute, or that for some reason teachers are particularly bad at money management. I am not buying either of those. Then add on top of it that the 50% of the work force that makes less than them ALSO has to work 12 months to make less than teachers make in 9, your claim be

Teachers are also among the most educated, being surpassed primarily by doctors, lawyers, and researchers (who are often themselves professors). The median income for a person with a "Bachelor's degree or more" is 49k and for someone with a masters degree is 52k. If I recall correctly, the average (or median?) salary for WI teachers was 51k, and they are the highest paid teachers in the country (both stats were from the less-than-conservative news orgs). This puts the "best paid" teachers among the avera

Education degrees aren't real degrees and they cannot be compared. It is both a joke and a shame in all the other schools on every campus and has been for decades.

I agree with that, but they cost just as much as the "real" degrees do, not to mention that a college degree really isn't much more than a piece of paper that gets you a job these days anyway. Also, even in a "sham" degree, they still make you do shit that takes just as much time as the crap you have to do in any other degree. The difference is merely that "education" as a topic, is bullshit. The fact that it's a joke doesn't necessarily help the people who have to go through it, though.

There are several problems with your argument. First, your claim of 51k average salary being the highest paid teachers in the country is wrong. Not kinda wrong but WAY off. I don't know where you got your data, but it wasn't from your "Citation".

My source is the National Teachers Association. The very first state I looked at was my own state, California. What did I find? STARTING salaries are $41k, and AVERAGE salaries are $68k. That means that many are making over $95k. Very simply, this is not

My cousin is a teacher and she does teach summer school to make ends meet, spends extra hours at school with endless meetings, spends hours at home grading papers, preparing lessons etc.
It isn't all beer and skittles my friend.

I never understand this class wars business, where the rich pit their non-unionized minions against the unionized employees. Teachers make a liveable income but it's not a life of luxury like the actual upper class would have you believe. To the poor right: stop voting against your interests! If you are upset because you think teachers have it better than you, the solution isn't to bring teachers down, it's to fight for an incr

Short hours, long summer vacation, lack of supervision, great retirement benefits, union benefits, tenure, and discount at Border's books all come to mind. Not to mention that teachers pay increases have outstripped inflation consistently which cannot be said of very many fields. I don't begrudge teachers what they are paid, but they are represented by the largest union in the country, and they are not under compensated as a group and I am tired of hearing that refrain.

Short hours and long vacations are a bit misleading, all the teachers I've ever known have done a lot extra on top of the "office hours" of 9 to 3 or whatever.

Lack of supervision certainly doesn't apply here in the UK, there is a lot of testing, monitoring and so on. You get a reasonable pension here (at the moment) and there is indeed a good union, but tenure doesn't apply to teachers here.

I don't know, but there seem to be quite a few teachers who go about their job the wrong way. They're extremely short tempered and take offense to nearly everything (even given their situation, this is not appropriate), act like a dictator in their own classrooms (such as censoring speech that opposes their own political views even when the students are allowed to speak), treat their students like garbage (constantly yell and throw out anyone who merely questions or corrects them), and fail to make the clas

They may like teaching, but many of them (that I've seen) don't appear to be good at it. If you don't have patience, you really, really shouldn't be a teacher.

I think we need to make teaching more attractive as a career to build a bigger (hopefully better) pool of applicants to pick from. Regardless of what Fox News says, they are underpaid considering the job requirements and stress they deal with.

It's not the money that's the problem really. Oh sure, the newbies make shit money, but they eventually do all right.

The problem is the job itself, and its not getting easier.

I am given to understand that garbage men make a pretty decent wage. However, the reason that many don't consider that a field worth aspiring to is because as a job, it fucking sucks. The same thing goes for teaching, only the suckage comes from a different set of causes.

Personally, from my observations, schools would benefit more from hiring more people to help, than they would benefit by paying existing teachers more money. There is no lack of people qualified to do something in a school. What there is a lack of is people hired to do that work. Workloads are high, and classroom sizes are getting bigger. They need more people, but the fact of the matter is that the very unions with their tenure and working to increase existing teacher salaries means that the number of open positions for people who train to be teachers is pretty small. They can't very well hire more people if they have to either give them tenure or worse, not be able to keep them on because otherwise the union will force the district to hand out tenure or to let them go.

Teachers may well be a little underpaid, but what they are mostly is *under supported*.

I meant it as a friendly but semi-serious question about whether the OP was reading the students correctly or not, but it seems that the wry smile it was said with got lost in the translation to text.

That said, your serious question deserves a serious reply: maybe I had an unusually poor experience in the education system, but my general conversations on the subject lead me to believe it was more or less standard. I met a few good teachers, and they make a wonderful contribution to society, I absolutely agr

I probably wouldn't recommend Wikipedia for too young an age group, because their attention span is too short and they need something more interactive. Eighth grade might be about the right time to introduce them to it, but getting them into editing articles is probably something to shoot for more at the 10-12th grade level. Sure, citing "reliable sources" is a pain in the butt when you're a student, but that and writing in general are very useful skills to develop in science. The higher up you go in your c

Seriously though you have to decide if you're trying to make them learn, in which case tossing them in the deep end at arxiv is appropriate, or just filling time and trying to be cool, in which case its youtube video time.